Flashback: Bill Gates on “Content is King” in 1996

Following up on my previous post regarding the importance of content, here is a piece title “Content is King” written by Bill Gates in 1996. To summarize, he says that micropayments will make everything work a lot better on the internet:

…within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content
providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information.
If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won’t be
writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You’ll
just click on what you want, knowing you’ll be charged a nickel
on an aggregated basis.

Ten years later and we’re not there yet… but we do have google adsense. Click on that, the content provider makes a nickel and voila, content providers are paid for their work!